Anyone who thinks education is the “civil rights issue of our time”  needs to look at what’s going on in Chicago. In three days of protests over the weekend and lapping into Monday, people who look like they would be involved in a civil rights cause – mostly African-American and Latino/a teachers, parents, and students, [...]

“It’s always hard to tell for sure exactly when a revolution starts,” wrote John Tierny in The Atlantic  recently. “I’m not an expert on revolutions,” he continued, “but even I can see that a new one is taking shape in American K-12 public education.” Tierney pointed to a number of signs of the coming “revolution:” [...]

By now it’s become clear to anyone willing to pay attention that our nation’s obsession over education standards and testing has gotten out of hand. Ratcheting education standards ever higher at the same time we cut supports that schools and students need to reach those standards never made any sense to begin with. And the [...]

Cuts to government spending like the now-reviled “sequester” are not only “dumb” as my colleague Robert Borosage explained this week. They are literally making us dumber. What’s dumb is to cut money for air traffic controllers and endanger airline passengers and relegate them to long waits for delayed flights. What’s even dumber is to cut [...]

By now, there have been plenty of negative reactions to last week’s defeat of sensible gun regulation in the U.S. Senate due to the power of the gun lobby to have more sway with senators than popular opinion has. In his Rose Garden address, President Obama was incredulous that legislation favored by 90 percent of [...]

Now that every major media outlet has weighed in on the budget that President Obama introduced last week, the conventional wisdom is that Obama has proposed a “balance” of new revenues and spending cuts with an emphasis on sacrificing “entitlements” enjoyed by old people in order to increase “investments” in children. This sensibility was most [...]

Everyone at all familiar with the Judgment of Solomon has to be aghast as political leaders reverse that Biblical wisdom and proceed to “split the difference” over who gets whose way on matters affecting children. Instead of putting the interests of children first, there’s a prevailing wisdom among political centrists inside the Beltway that “compromising” [...]

No offense, but the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education building in Washington, DC is not a pretty sight. Crossing the National Mall on 4th street, you pass between the glisteningly modern National Air and Space Museum and the sculpted brown stone of the National Museum of the American Indian to come face to face [...]

America’s education polices are brimming with contradiction. Schools, we’re told, need more standardization, but parents need more choices, which standardization precludes. Teachers need to be held to more accountability, but entry into the teaching force needs to be easier with fewer qualifications. This kind of contradiction applies to one of the more contentious ideas often [...]

Chicago, the city famous for “big shoulders,” has a big mouth, too. Spurred by an alarming level of school building closures – 61 in all – mandated by Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration, Chicagoans are speaking out loudly and forcefully against a plan to “downsize the facility footprint of the district.” A point being made [...]